Isabella M. Weber is political economist, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as well as the author of a highly acclaimed book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (Routledge). Her book, which has won plaudits from Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, the historian Adam Tooze and Harvard's renowned political economist and China expert Dwight Perkins, details the discussions that shaped China's historic reforms of the 1980s, and why it ultimately rejected a big bang approach to changing its system. What follows is a lightly edited interview with Professor Weber.
Isabella Weber.Illustration by Lauren Crow
Q: Professor Weber, your book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, is a fascinating look at how Beijing dealt with economic reforms and international advice in the 1980s. How did you come to focus on this topic?
A: When I started, I was puzzled by the explanations of China’s economic success. There was an
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